Armenian Genocide Resource Center
6 months ago
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What’s in a name? Let’s start with the Persian Gulf. Or the Arabian Gulf. Or just the Arab Gulf. I’m indebted to reader (and surgeon) Ross Farhadieh for complaining to me last week about my use of “The Gulf” – bland, dull and historically anaemic – in a column on Iran and its possible return to geopolitical power in the Middle East. Historically, legally – and in the UN – Ross told me, it should be called the Persian Gulf. It was Gamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalism which renamed it the “Arabian Gulf”.
And Ross is right. And I think I know the background to this slippage in nomenclature. When I worked in the Middle East forThe Times – long before Murdoch emasculated the paper – we found that whenever we referred to the Persian Gulf, Arab states would refuse to let the paper go on sale in Dubai or Cairo. But whenever we called it the Arabian Gulf, the paper was not allowed into Iran.
So we went for “The Gulf”. Maybe this was a bit cowardly – I wasn’t involved in the decision – but many other papers followed suit. The British press was not going to be censored in the Middle East if a little historical obfuscation could be built in to our copy. The Independent, still unborn at the time, referred quite innocently to The Gulf once it began publication – probably without the slightest idea of why it didn’t carry the Persian or Arabian appellation.
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We’d always had a faintly similar problem with Northern Ireland. In the worst days of the war there, we on The Times often used “Ulster” as shorthand for the six-county province – only to find that Irish readers in the Republic took great exception to the name. Ulster, they rightly pointed out, historically contained nine counties, which included the three counties of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, which the Protestant seigneurs of the north declined to accept in Northern Ireland because (of course) these three counties had too many Catholics. Irish republicans – or just plain Irish citizens – preferred the “Six Counties” or, at a push, Northern Ireland. They were right. But since The Times still sold in the Republic, we went on using Ulster when we felt like it. Indeed, my first book on Irish history included the word Ulster in the title. And it meant six, not nine, counties.
I tended to take a harsher view of countries whose titles began with the words “the People’s Democratic Republic of” – mainly because they invariably belonged to their dictators rather than their people, and were neither popular nor democratic. Yemen – or the PDRY – for example. So we called it just Yemen – or Algeria, which also likes to call itself popular and democratic.
Then we had to acknowledge Father Time. My dad, a veteran of what he called “The Great War” of 1914-18, went on calling it that long after the second and even more titanic bloodbath had been fought around the world. The Brits officially decided to call the Great War the First World War – in, I think, 1948 – because they had to yield to history. My dad’s war had not proved to be the war to end all wars after all, and we had to acknowledge that. I still like the epic ring of The Great War – but by 1945, the Great bit simply didn’t work any more.
